Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Next day
Red clay moving beneath his fingers, alternately resisting and bending to his will—the line of a clavicle here…
a curve of a hip there, flowing into the long length of a feminine leg—Tristan sank into the feeling of creation that never failed to bring him deep satisfaction.
Not much rivaled the experience of molding human form from sticky dirt.
Perhaps the invitation in his model’s dark, doe-like eyes.
An invitation he must refuse.
“Our session today will be a short one,” he said, blunt. He wasn’t one for small talk.
“A short one?” asked the model, an Italian principessa with a penchant for sculptors. She was lush and curvy and utterly spoiled and entirely accustomed to getting her way. “But you, mio amante, specialize in long sessions—very long.”
He glanced up, impatient. “Not tonight.” He really wished she would stop moving. “I must attend a soirée.”
Her full lips formed into a pout. “You don’t like large gatherings of people. From my experience, you much prefer a small gathering of two. Alone. Preferably with a soft surface somewhere near.”
Tristan snorted. She wasn’t wrong. Even so… “It happens this soirée is being held in my honor.” That would teach him to spread his money around with endowments for schools.
The principessa licked her lips and tossed her glorious head of sable hair. “I want you to place those big hands of yours on me and make love to me all night.”
“Not tonight.”
She must’ve heard the implacability in his voice, for in an instant, her pout turned into fury provoked by denial.
She bolted upright on a huff, grabbed her discarded gown, and marched across the studio where she dressed in the haphazard manner of one unaccustomed to dressing herself. Of course, she had servants for that.
Tristan could be a gentleman and assist her, but he hadn’t come to Italy to be a gentleman. He’d come here to be an artist, and right now the muse was flowing.
Still, he maintained half an eye on her. Best one kept watch on an angry lover, a maxim borne from painful experience. Some ladies possessed right good throwing arms.
“I come first or not at all,” the principessa hissed at him as she jerked the door open. He should probably mention that the buttons of her dress didn’t line up and her right breast looked in danger of spilling from her square-cut bodice. He’d leave her unintended double entendre unmentioned, too.
Instead, he snorted.
She gave a tiny roar of frustration and slammed the door behind her.
He’d rather she’d left it open for the light breeze that always picked up in late afternoon.
Still, relief swept through him. His relations with the principessa had reached the point that he would rather deal with the facsimile of the woman—in this case a clay statue—than the actual flesh-and-blood woman.
It was the inevitable end, for like every woman he’d known, she had her demands. Most of them he could fulfill to both their satisfaction, save one—the one that ever proved the breaking point.
That he set her on a pedestal and adore her.
It wasn’t that women weren’t worthy of adoration.
It was that no one was.
Weren’t they all human with wants and needs? All in search of that kernel of the ineffable that could make them happy? And if not happy, then fulfilled?
Becoming enslaved to another wasn’t the way to achieve that outcome.
He grabbed a large towel and dipped it into a drum of water before draping it over the sculpture to prevent it from drying out. He would be lucky if the principessa let him finish.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d lost a mistress in the middle of a sculpture. Nor would it be the last, he suspected.
Truth told, the charity soirée didn’t figure into Tristan’s equation for fulfillment, either. In fact, he resented the world outside his studio for intruding into his life.
After all, he’d chosen this estate on the outskirts of Florence for a reason.
Well, several reasons. The house was set on top of a hill, which allowed the breeze through at all hours.
His studio was separate from the house, so he didn’t have servants banging about all day—Cook was a whistler.
But the most important reason was its seclusion.
Not a single aristocrat—English or otherwise—within a mile.
But, of course, he’d had to go and throw money around to help the less fortunate, and the aristocrats had noticed. No good deed went unpunished.
Then he’d had to go and donate to a charity raffle.
The Contessa di Mapelli, who was organizing the soirée, had informed him of a children’s school a few miles beyond the outskirts of the city that had a leaky roof.
Before he knew what he was saying, he’d volunteered to sculpt a bust of a raffle winner and, further, to supplement the monies raised to provide an entirely new building for the children.
The donation itself, he didn’t mind. But he would also be paying with something more precious: his time. He would have to spend time with the lucky aristocrat who won tonight’s raffle, which would eat into his remaining six months in Italy.
And he only had himself to blame.
He lifted the cloth off the sculpture. As he walked around the pedestal, viewing it from every angle, his mind’s eye struggled to recapture a picture of the principessa in repose, lush and desirous.
Instead, an altogether different image insisted on pushing in: a woman…
tall and willowy of form…English elegance…
Outraged eyes staring up at him from the ground, her skirts billowed about her…
Strangely, he found himself wishing the woman had accepted his hand to assist her to her feet.
He wanted to peel away her kidskin glove and know the feel of that hand.
The flesh. The sinew and bone beneath. Hers would be a slender, elegant hand possessed of steel, like the rest of her, he suspected.
He gave his head a clearing shake, dismissing the image and the woman.
He’d come to Italy to escape her sort—English…
proper. Now, he had but a mere six months before he would return to the soggy shores of his homeland and resume his rightful place in its hierarchy.
He wouldn’t waste that time thinking about proper Englishwomen with blue eyes that sparked with fire and hair that shone platinum in the sun and whose curls only awaited a light breeze to become unruly.
No, he wouldn’t think about that woman at all.
Instead, he would attempt to bend a stubborn lump of clay to his will for a while longer, before closing up his studio for the evening.
Then he would try to make himself presentable for a gathering of his peers. He wasn’t sure he even knew how anymore.
He might have gone entirely to seed.
Well, perhaps not entirely gone to seed, Tristan thought as he stepped inside the contessa’s ballroom presently accommodating a few hundred of her closest friends. In fact, it might be possible that he cleaned up well enough for decency’s sake.
Still, he hadn’t felt this grouchy in a good number of years. Four and a half, to be exact—since he’d left England.
“Ripon, your smile is slipping,” said the Contessa di Mapelli, or Bianca as she preferred to be called. Her arm twined through the crook of his. “Walk the room with me.”
“I never did learn the knack of it,” he said.
“The knack of walking?”
“Smiling.”
This provoked a girlish laugh from the contessa. “You simply haven’t met the right woman.” She swept her closed fan in a wide arc. “Perhaps she is in this very room tonight.”
“Are you propositioning me, Bianca?” he asked, flirtatious. Perhaps he hadn’t gone to seed at all.
She gave his arm a light swat. “If I were a few decades younger, none of these other ladies would stand a chance. Now, paste a smile on your face. The Earl of Inesley promised funding for a mural restoration a year ago, and now we must shame him into turning promises into coins.”
As they wended their way through the room toward their quarry, Tristan couldn’t help noticing the way his countrymen and women observed him—like an escaped zoo animal who needed to be returned to his cage.
But, really, could he blame them? After all, it had created quite the stir when his fiancée, Lady Sarah Locksley, had jilted him. Except…
Was it a jilting if the split happened three days before the wedding? He wasn’t sure, but that was how he referred to the event in his mind. The Jilting. Not that it hadn’t been amicable on his part—and a relief. Lady Sarah, however, hadn’t felt quite so sanguine.
The contessa located her prey and commenced her public shaming with a generous smile on her face. Tristan settled back and appeared entranced by her every word. As he had no intention of engaging in small talk this evening, he found monosyllabic grunts to be effective in staving off attempts.
In truth, he hadn’t been prepared for the sheer number of his compatriots in one room, many of whom regarded him with knowing cuts of the eye or sharp little smiles about their mouths.
They were curious about him. Which was to be expected, for Lady Sarah had sullied his name to anyone who would listen, electing not to leave the reason for their split a mystery.
Truly, the ton loved nothing more than to form their own interpretation of events that had naught to do with them, but she’d chosen the opposite course and branded him a knave.
Perhaps he was.
Yet he refused to bear her any ill will. After all, the whole kerfuffle was the impetus he’d needed to leave England and seek broader vistas on the Continent. Really, she’d given him the gift of four and a half of the best years of his life.
“Move with me, Ripon,” said the contessa.
“Are there others in need of a good shaming?” he asked.
The contessa’s mouth curved in a feline smile. “Always.”